Watching the world of east London politics

A personal blog on the unusual world of East End politics by me, Ted Jeory, a (former) Tower Hamlets resident and an ex-accountant who spent nine years in the City and in business before becoming an award-winning deputy editor of the East London Advertiser where I used to write a weekly column called Trial by Jeory.

I moved from the ELA to the Sunday Express full time in late 2008 where I became Whitehall Editor and Home Affairs Editor working in the Westminster Lobby on off-diary stories and investigations. In August 2013, I became Digital News Director for the Express website.

I was shortlisted for Mind’s Journalist of the Year award in 2012 for leading the Sunday Express’s groundbreaking mental health campaign which won Mind’s Making a Difference Award that year.

I’ve been a speaker at the Centre for Investigative Journalism’s summer school since 2011 and in December 2014 I left the Express group to concentrate on longer form investigations. I was deputy editor at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, then investigations editor at The Independent. In January 2017 I joined Finance Uncovered as co-director where we train journalists in mainly developing countries in how to investigate forms of illicit finance and then work with them to produce cross-border stories involving a UK link. Strangely enough, there are plenty of them…

I created this blog in 2010, partly because local papers weren’t able to devote enough resources to holding Tower Hamlets council to account; and probably more because I missed doing it.

I write it in my spare time and as such the posts are not be as regular as they need to be, but at its peak I tried to write something at least once a week.

Since Lutfur Rahman was removed from office in April 2015, I haven’t devoted much time to it, but I still keep an eye on developments and I intend to return.

The views I express here are defintely not those of my employer. In February 2013, this blog became the first to be shortlisted for the Private Eye/Guardian Paul Foot Award for Investigative Journalism…which made me quite chuffed.